After a day of mostly confusion, Box Office Mojo is back up. It has not, strangely, been updated in a few days - but the original site is there. (Other strange things - “Last Updated 12/31/1969,” “#1 Movie: ‘ ‘”, etc.) But even though it’s back, the amount of uproar/confusion (at least within the film reporting community) only serves to highlight the importance it plays in providing a huge amount of movie data (financial and otherwise) and how easy it would be for IMDb/Amazon to pull it away.

But the question is, how do you completely reproduce that level of data? Where do you get it (in a legitimate way)? The site doesn’t actually have all that much in the way of data - daily box office domestically and internationally per movie, movie-specific info (runtime, budget, etc.), cast and crew info, and some level of tagging. It’s the depth of the dataset (having daily box office for a movie) and the breadth of their coverage (effectively all movies released in the last 15 years) that would be difficult, but not impossible, to reassemble elsewhere. To be honest, though - as long as there is a legitimate, trusted, separate source for this data, it’s really not that hard to put together (it’s really, in the grand scheme of things, not that much data).

This conversation among a few involved in the film industry - bloggers, producers, interested people - reinforces the idea that an independent source of this data is crucial. It also raises a few other interesting points - like the idea that IMDb has focused on unnecessary features rather than better data (or even better ways to access data). But it’s unclear how to create a viable alternative. In the meantime, we still have Mojo.

(I also missed a serious opportunity yesterday to make this the headline - honestly, film reporters, you all missed it. Everybody failed.)